Outlook 2007 Users: Time to Upgrade

Submitted by bhall on September 13, 2017 - 10:26am

Brandon HallDirector of Technology

Outlook 2007 users should be aware that this edition of Outlook and Office has come to end of life, meaning Microsoft will no longer provide support for these products. No support means no updates, and no updates means you are running software with holes in it that malware and malicious users can use to gain access to your system - or worse.

Luckily, there are many upgrade options. They have made Office 2016 that you can purchase outright via a download ($349 for Professional on Amazon), or you can use their subscription model and purchase Office 365. If you have multiple devices, the Office 365 option is your cheaper option. It is a subscription model, but in the long term it will be cheaper for multiple devices.

Office 365 comes with one drive, but it is not an approved storage location for securities documents. This is not a compliant location for client files or client information to be held. If this is a feature that you would like to use or may find valuable, FHC has one approved cloud storage provider called Sharefile. A Sharefile subscription must be run through FHC, so contact me if you would like to get signed up with this product. The cost is $30 per month per full licensed user. There are also free licenses called Client Licenses available with less features, so we should have a conversation about what the use case is for the license. Any office wanting to use Sharefile will need at least 1 full license to have access to the platform. We do not allow the secure email portion of sharefile to be used simply because we already have a solution in place.